I looked at Bloomer to see what it's all about! My one thing: I don't really understand what it's for unless I get digging. Something on the homepage that explains it (or better, shows it) further would be great :)

I've tried to learn functional programming, but feel it's too hard to learn when everyone's afraid of words like monads and functors. But when reading about the concepts they feel very simple. What do you think about FP in JS for everyday work, and the future progress of FP in JS? Why do you think people are scared to learn this kind of stuff?

Yeah most FP stuff gets real deep real quick and lots of devs are left more confused than when they came in. It's not that people are scared, it just is often way over their heads.

unpopular opinion: If you are just learning JS, don't worry about FP or OOP - just make it work. As you get better, you'll pick up little pieces of FP and start to realize why everyone is so hyped about it.

After some successful blog posts, I had a few publishers ask me to write a book on Sublime Text. I'm pretty business savvy so I quickly realized it was a terrible deal where they pay you peanuts.

So - I decided to write the thing myself. I will detail this more on my Syntax.fm podcast in 2 weeks - it's already recorded.

stickers? - the stickers are a bit of labour of love - I don't make much (it used to be a loss until I figured a few things out!) from them but I do it because it's really fun to make something real and it give me a chance to connect with the people who take my courses.

I want to start a video blog about programming, but in spanish, because I want video blogs like that in my language, do you have any tips to someone that's going to do something like this for the first time?

Hey Wes, thank you for your time. I'm a year old developer, I want to freelance even as I learn the MERN stack. I found that Wordpress development is the best thing to do, how deep do I need to learn Wordpress, or what ways could I use it as a freelancer? Thanks 🔥

Hey Wes, I was hoping you'd touch briefly on the #productivity side of things. One thing that immediately stands out when viewing your overall professional presence is just the sheer volume of substantial and successful projects, courses, etc., that you've undertaken.

I'm sure the shortest and truest answer is that "It's a ton of hard work," but I was wondering whether there were any eureka moments or specific insights that have helped you find such productivity and ability to execute.

Make a list of all the different areas of that topic that need to be learned - templating, data fetching, caching, image resizing, authentication, file uploads, realtime

Dream up an example application that is equal parts fun to build and real world enough that it would apply to your real work.

Research the crap out of the topic - even if it's something I've been doing for years I always research different possible ways of building the application, best practices, gotchas. I usually do this by reading all the docs of a project, reading blog posts from industry experts and watching conference talks on YouTube.

Build the thing we are going to build - I usually do this a few times and then refactor every line until I'm happy with it. I put a lot of effort into making the application easy to grok a few months later so you'll notice that I sometimes forgo dozens of small index.js files that can easily confuse and ruin a tutorial for you.

Once I'm happy with what we are going to build, I have a few industry experts code review it - make sure everything is up to snuff with best practices.

Then the hardest part is figuring out how to incrementally build the application in steps. Each video should be less than 20 minutes long, but we should also have something working by the end of it. Application development isn't always linear so this is something I've spent a lot of time on.

once it's all broken down into sections - I have rough notes on what needs to happen in each video and then I record!

It's a lot of work - this process takes 4-5 months.

My advice would be to not worry about process too much and just start creating things - you'll figure it out pretty quickly. What I do might not work for everyone :)

Hey, Wes!
Since I know you so well, I only have one question — it's a bit personal!

Q: — How's life as an educator? I have been meaning to quit freelancing back in the day (2010) and I did, moved to products side of things, now I have been meaning to quit products and get into teaching (I love to teach, it's genetic believe me) — but the amount of time getting spent on building one free course have scared the shit out of me (English is not my native lang but I do OK...). Now, I am afraid to embark on a journey of building a premium course that would take about six months. While I have a huge audience, what if the course I am building doesn't get enough sales? — Scary waters!

I freelanced for the first 3 years of selling courses so it wasn't all that scary for me. The ship was close enough to the dock by the time I made that jump.

It is a ton of work, as is things like maintenance and support of the courses. I'm still figuring that out so I'm not sure I have an answer for you.

You should have an idea that your course will sell well - if you are going in blind I'd recommend doing some smaller stuff to test the topic's waters first. Free course, blog posts, tweet tips, podcasts, youtube vids will all show you if people are hungry for that topic.

Wes, I just want to tell you that you're the most phenomenal teacher out there, there's something incredibly friendly about your approach to teaching which helps even the most entry level devs to pick it up with supreme ease. Thanks for your on going contribution to the community!

I absolutely love your courses (particularly with the option to have captioning), I have about 3 of them and I'm still going back to them when I find that I might have forgotten a specific detail.

Ever thought about doing a course on TDD? I have found there's not a lot of tutorials or material that covers test driven development (especially with JavaScript). Would this be a possible one to undertake?

Randomly, I'm just writing a course on JavaScript testing right now. I'll have a 7-day FREE mini-course on JavaScript testing coming out before the end of August. If you fancy getting involved then you can sign up here

How did you become so awesome at speaking and instructing/teaching? Any formal training or just natural born talent? Any tips for n00bs such as myself who want to start sharing knowledge in a meaningful, helpful, and memorable way?

When I've built at least 3-4 real world things in it. Most of the things I teach are lessons learned from me applying it in the field. I've been learning GraphQL for the 6 months or so, and just getting into a space where I feel comfortable enough with it that I'm starting to talk about it :)

How can I measure the self-study level and know how much I really learned, and to know if I'm ready to share/teach that knowledge, and stablish this method as a real opportunity to improve the work that I do with my mates on our small development adventures?, also do you have any tip to improve the ‘creative’ process in to development process and specially to take an usable advantage of training courses?. :D

What's it like teaching full time as well as doing your own development? Or more specifically, how do you manage your time doing both? Being a TA as well as keeping up my programming skills was too much for me, so I'd love to hear how you do it.

Hi Wes. I've been a front end developer (mainly using Angular) for the best part of four years and I think it's time to broaden my skill set. What's a recommended path to follow to become a full stack developer?

When it comes to learning development online, I’ve found that even with the best material I will often miss being able to ask questions to an instructor or expert to really understand the material and how to apply it. Any thoughts on solutions for this need or how it might be met in other ways? Thanks!

1) Security in NodeJS? blog, video tutorial or book to recommend?
2) How to HTTPS NodeJS for free?
3) Do you have any React/Redux boilerplate code? I want to learn more or great programmers like you do that configuration.

Thank you, I took the NodeJS course it was fantastic! I will take more courses soon!! U R gr8!

Hi Wes. You've said you do a lot of reading of docs when you prepare. I always find reading docs like running through quicksand. I end up skim-reading and not taking anything in. Any tips about going through docs when learning new things? Thanks.

Thanks for your reply.
I've only been programming properly for a year and about 6 months into my first commercial role - a lot of learning is "on the go". But looking at tests is a good tip. Thanks. :)

I haven't been around in the industry for that long, and I find it really difficult to take the time to learn new things while doing my job, so most of the time I just stick to the things I know and am comfortable with. Besides, after work I'm usually pretty beat mentally and can't find the motivation to go and learn new things, and having other hobbies certainly doesn't help.

So I guess my question is, how do you manage to separate your work life, your passion for what you do and your other hobbies in a way that you get to do all that and spend time with your family at the same time?

Where do you feel most people go wrong when they are learning a new language?

As someone that's recently started learning JavaScript there are times while working through books/tutorials that I feel like I've missed something big that I should know in order to deal with the exercise ahead of me.

Quick question : what do you think about web templating engines ? I mean some templating like r ERB, Liquid, Slim, etc (I quote ruby only because I am a new in the coding world and I don't know so many other stuff yet).
Ruby or not, do you advise to use some templating for HTML ? I mean something like ERB in order to put algorithm in HTML or put some short lines not to repeat headers / footers all the time for example ? Or do you advise to use plain old HTML all the time ?

Haha - thats a joke but kind of not. I'm not really all that efficient - I have to go all over the web to learn something and it takes a long time. That is why I create my courses - sometimes people only have a few days to get up to speed on a topic

Don't know if we're still going, but, as I'm of the opinion that coding expertise is at least one part collecting and identifying bugs, what was the oddest/most annoying/most stealthy bug you dealt with?